Monthly Archives: December 2009

David Douglas and John Christy have posted “A Climatology Conspiracy “ on the American Thinker blog. My brief summary of their posting is as follows:

Douglas, Christy, Pearson and Singer (DCPS) submitted a paper to the International Journal of Climatology (IJC) and it was peer reviewed, accepted and published on line on 5 December 2007. The paper demonstrated that the IPCC climate models that predicted significant “global warming” were largely in disagreed with the observational data.

Thanks to the Climategate release of emails from the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit (CRU) we know how Team Hockey Stick (THS) reacted to the paper’s publication. Notified by Andy Revkin of the New York Times, who said the team “…really do need a scrub of singer/christy/etc. effort.”, THS sprang into action.

Taking the lead was Ben Santer, who did not want to respond directly to the DCPS paper because the authors of the DCPS would get the customary “final word”. The plan called for Santer to prepare a paper for submittal to the IJC that will dispose of the DCPS arguments; however there was a problem with this plan in that the Santer paper was about a year behind the already published DCPS. Tim Osborn of CRU, who is also on the editorial board of IJC, contacted the editor of the IJC, Glenn McGregor, who, according to Osborn , “promises to do everything he can to achieve a quick turn-around” of the Santer paper. Osborn also says in his email: “(and please treat this in confidence, which is why I emailed you and Phil only) that he (McGregor] may be able to hold back the hardcopy (i.e., the print/copy version) appearance of Douglas et al., possibly so that any accepted Santer et al comment could appear along side it.)”. Thus, on 11 January 2008, THS is informed that it is agreed that the print versions of both papers will be published side-by-side. They will expedite the process do by identifying in “advance reviewers who are both suitable and available” and delaying the print version of the DCPS paper.

On the 15 November 2008, both papers, Santer and DCPS appear in print. The DCPS paper waited over eleven months to appear in print and the Santer paper took only 36 days.

Any errors in the preceding summary are mine. The full posting includes even more intrigue and it is a must read. The full posting by Douglas and Christie can be read here.

If you are a skeptic, you have been or will be accused of being in the pocket of some energy company. Often it is a blanket accusation. The mainstream media often report these accusations without any investigation of the truth of the charge. So, one has to wonder why the US media does not report the worldwide business interests of Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the UN’s IPCC . Can you conceive of anyone that would have more influence on the science or political direction of the IPCC’s Report on Climate Change than the Chairman. It would seem that the media would see this a major input for those trying to decide what to believe.

We need to give a hat tip to UK Telegraph because they have been trying to inform the people in the UK about Pachauri. They have had some success in getting attention in other parts of the world:

“But nowhere did it provoke a greater storm than in India, where Dr Pachauri is director-general of The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), based in New Delhi, the country’s most influential private body involved in climate-change issues and renewable energy. In addition, as we reported, Dr Pachauri also holds more than a score of positions with banks, universities and other institutions that benefit from the vast worldwide industry now based on measures to halt climate change.”

To get more detail regarding his business interests, the following are sources. The initial report in the Telegraph can be read here. Follow-up in the Telegraph can be read here.

The EU Referendum has additional coverage that will interest you. Read here,here, here and here.

The December 09 Scientific American says that “ What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming”. Scientific American offers a “partial list of the contrarian’s bad arguments”. Viscount Monckton takes this list apart and then states the real science behind skeptics thinking. It is tour de force by Lord Monckton and well worth reading. Click here to read Monckton’s report.

The predicate for the theory of man-made global warming (AGW) is that temperatures are rising, and at an accelerated rate due to man-made greenhouse gases, most particularly, CO2. The most infamous proof of that predicate was the Mann Hockey Stick chart which extended back a thousand years to the present time. The chart, shows a nearly flat temperature line for the first 900 or so years after which time it begins to head North, indicating an unprecedented increase in global temperatures that coincided with a measured increase in atmospheric CO2.

MANN HOCKEY STICK CHART

While the proponents of this chart still are peer reviewing each other’s work and pronouncing it valid research, even the IPCC, which featured it in earlier reports, dropped it from the most recent (2007) report.

Climategate (released CRU email) has shown that leading suppliers of ground station temperature reports, have been manipulating the data to support their contention that these days are really unusual times. This is not news to the Skeptics. But it is nice to have it confirmed by the emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU).

My contention is that the only global temperature record that can legitimately be used to conclude whether global temperatures are rising, falling, or holding steady is the satellite data produced by UAHuntsville. The satellite data has been available since late 1978. The data collected is from most of the globe (oceans included, of course) which is vastly superior to the data assembled for the ground stations. But my guess is that, perhaps 50 or more years are needed to get a real understanding of the data global temperature trends.

At one time there were some issues with the UAH data as the satellites tended to drift in orbit and the data derived needed some corrections. But the UAH now uses new satellites. Jeff Id, wrote as follows on the new accuracy of the UAH measurement:

The new AQUA satellite used in UAH has a station keeping thruster which keeps the measurement time of each gridcell constant for years at a time. The thing I think some miss about this is that the huge massive corrections which must be implemented over a day are suddenly the same correction value from day to day – no change. Therefore errors in corrections no longer create artificial trends. We’ve got our first high accuracy global trend measurement –ever.

Jeff Id also presented these charts of the data provided by UAH:

The temperature according to UAH over the period of their satellite measurements -1978 to 2010 yields an global temperature increase of 0.1258degrees C which equates to 0.0562 degrees C per decade.

Recently the global temperature has taken a turn downward. The UAH chart since 2002 is shown below- the time since UAH began using the Aqua Satellites.

Looking at this short interval, since June 2002, the global temperature has declined by 0.1677degrees C which would work out to be 0.2292 degrees C decrease over a decade.

It is hard to separate anti-Americanism and anti-Capitalism, and indeed America and capitalism are probably synonymous. The UN, AGW and Socialism are probably equally as synonymous. Consider how the delegates to the UN sponsored Copenhagen Climate Conference reacted to speeches by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and Zimbabean strongman Robert Mugabe. They cheered these two thugs every time they criticized America or Capitalism. The AGW have often been called “watermellons”—green on the outside but red on the inside.

Yes, they all want our dollars as reparations for the “harm” we have inflicted on them. While rational people know that money given to these heads of state will be pocketed and little if any will ever see its way down to the people that may have the need.

To look at what some of the other bloggers are thinking about regarding our “responsibility” to reward these thugs, click here,here, here and here

The SPPI report on CO2 for November covers –Climategate; No global warming in the 20th century; Forecasts of atmospheric CO2 levels in 2100; Sea level rise in 2009; and other interesting topics. To read this report, click here.

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus are believers in Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW, aka man-made global warming). Never-the-less, they have written a realistic blog entry about the Copenhagen Climate Conference. To understand why I say this, lets look at their blog entry lead to “Contrivance in Copenhagen”:

From the opening ceremony’s video of a little girl running from an earthquake to the promises of emissions reductions, everything taking place in Copenhagen is contrived. The outcome of climate talks — no treaty, no emissions reductions — was known in advance. And yet participants pretend there is an unfolding drama. As such, Copenhagen is history’s first completely postmodern global event. It’s a festival of phoniness. With the ambitions of Versailles but the power of Davos, Copenhagen creates a cognitive dissonance for its creators, which results in ever-more manic displays of apocalypse anxiety and false hope.

The authors build on this theme with this:

The final result is a conference that is desperately fake from beginning to end. It opened with a fictional girl who loses her polar bear to an angry earth. It will end on December 18, when President Obama and President Hu Jintao will, to the sound of thunderous applause, call for bold action while they, in reality, implement business-as-usual energy policies.

But it’s all transparently phony. There will be no “agreement” — Obama and Premier Wen Jiabao will simply announce their proposed national energy agendas as emissions reductions targets. As for being “politically binding,” both leaders remain bound to their nations, their interest groups, and their publics, not to each other, much less to U.N. diplomats.

The authors show that the UN centerpiece– carbon offsets, (the source of Al Gore’s recent wealth) are wide open to fraud:

Europe gamed the Kyoto protocol in 1997 by rigging the framework to start from a high 1990 baseline, instead of the much lower 1997 baseline. Europe was thus able to count big emissions declines dating back to the early 1990’s and create a perception of European leadership.

Europe’s claims are nothing short of fraudulent. Its emissions declined for reasons having nothing to do with Kyoto: rapid deindustrialization and a switch from coal to natural gas in the early ’90’s in Britain, and German reunification with a collapsing East German economy, are responsible for most of Europe’s claimed reductions.

As emissions rose, U.N. officials, European leaders, and greens maintained that progress was being made by pioneering the simulation of emissions reductions through what are known as “carbon offsets.” They are commodities with no fixed relationship to actual emissions reductions. A Stanford University study of the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism found that one- to two-thirds were completely phony, representations of emissions reductions not backed up by reality. The New York Times has charitably called Europe’s supposed reductions the result of “creative accounting.”

The authors also outline the insidious part that the media has played in this sham:

Journalists and activists alike value “global warming deniers” because they are useful villains in the story. Reporters and activists never tire of writing about Exxon-Mobil’s funding as some kind of a major scoop, and a researcher at Media Matters can feel like Woodward and Bernstein after just a few hours downloading IRS 990 financial statements from Guidestar.

But really it is phony investigative journalism posing as the real thing. In truth, skeptics of global warming are poor, not rich. According to Media Matters, Exxon-Mobil has given conservative think tanks less than $7 million total since 2001 — about $1 million a year. By contrast, the combined annual budgets of America’s leading environmental philanthropies and NGOs total well over $500 million a year. Two funders alone have promised to spend $2 billion on climate communications over the next few years. And governments collectively spend billions annually, as they should, funding climate scientists to conduct research and publish their work.

They believe that the AGW’s reliance on ever increasing levels of horror stories have backfired:

The big story is that there is now 20 years of evidence that green communications on climate have backfired. Public concern about global warming today is no greater than it was 20 years ago. Public support for action to reduce carbon emissions quickly evaporates as soon as there is a serious price tag attached. Increasingly dire warnings of impending climate catastrophes have triggered apocalypse fatigue and rising skepticism about climate science. Greens have not only failed to achieve action, they have made the situation worse, alienating the public even more than they had alienated them before 2004, when the two of us denounced apocalyptic environmentalism in “The Death of Environmentalism.

There are parts of this entry that are not factual in my estimation such as their contention that the Waxman-Markey bill would have little impact on the US economy. The say that ALL INDEPENDENT ANALYSIS show this. But except for advocate organizations like Greenpeace, I believe they are have missed all the analysis that show clearly the impact. The pupose of Waxman is to ration fossil and nuclear energy, drive up the price, and surplant fossil fuel use with high cost, not economically viable, alternative forms of energy.

The remainder of their posting is largely a discussion of philosophical concepts, particularily Nihilism and the AGW movement.